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THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
MEMOR.IALS
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I t's hard for a New Yorker to see how
many memorials of the Civil War fill
and shape this city-to really take in the
many things we pass by every day that
were made to the memory of bloody
battles that began down south, exactly a
hundred and fifty years ago. Hard be-
cause they mostly slide right by our no-
tice into the amnesia bin of a busy city
long since occupied by immigrants and
the children of immigrants, most of
them indifferent to that war's ghosts
and glories. Though the right to house
Grant's Tomb in this city was dearly
won, an informal office poll showed that
not one in ten N ew Yorkers has actually
visited it. Though the space across from
the Fifth Avenue Apple Store contains
the second-best big statue in the city-
Saint-Gaudens's Sherman with the
angel of victory-only half knew what
that space is called (Grand Army Plaza)
and only one which Army was so grand
:::: (Grant's, of the Potomac). Meanwhile,
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j: the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument to
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Union veterans-it's the white temple
S2 over at Eighty-ninth and Riverside-is
regularly confused with Grant's Tomb,
up at 122nd Street, while nobody in
our poll seemed to know where you
could find a statue of the guy who de-
signed the U.S.S. Monitor, with him
holding a model of the first ironclad in
his hand. (In Battery Park, as it hap-
pens.) And Union Square is confidently
identified as being named for the Union
cause when in fact its name long pre-
dates the war.
Fair enough. For a long time, the
North built its statues and then left the
strident exercise of memory to the los-
ing side. As a result, right up until the
nineteen -sixties the war was still being
taught, even in Northern public schools,
as a tragic battle between two noble
sides, each with it own unfortunate ex-
tremists. The war was parsed and pretti-
fied until it became the gallant saga of the
Blue and the Gray, with one great and
vile movie ("The Birth of a Nation") and
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one less great but less noxious one ("Gone
with the Wind") to reinforce the myth.
As late as 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., called for freedom to ring out
from Georgià s Stone Mountain, it was
the site of a colossal bas-relief monu-
ment, still in progress, to the heroes of
the Confederacy-and thus a regular
meeting place for the Klan.
One legacy of the civil-rights move-
ment that took hold around the time of
the Civil Wars centenary is that it has
become harder and harder for untruths
to be told uncurbed. The war was fought
over slavery. The Southern states se-
ceded because Abraham Lincoln had
been elected President, and he was what
we now call a single-issue candidate,
who had been nominated by a single-
issue party, and that issue was to prevent
slavery from spreading and, ultimately,
to make it extinct. As John Stuart Mill
wrote from London in 1862, in "The
Contest in Americà':
The world knows what the question be-
tween the North and South has been for
many years, and still is. Slavery alone was
thought of, alone talked of. Slavery was bat-
tled for and against on the floor of Congress
and in the plains of I(ansas; on the Slavery
question exclusively was the party consti-
tuted which now rules the United States; on
slavery Fremont was rejected, on slavery
Lincoln was elected; the South separated on
slavery, and proclaimed slavery as the one
cause of separation.
Lincoln's Republican Party was di-
vided between hard-liners, who thought
that slavery had to end soon, and moder-
ates, who thought that it would fall on its
own sooner or later. But all understood
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 9, 2011
21